Pub Date : 2021-08-06DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1957354
Daniele Fulvi
ABSTRACT In this paper, I demonstrate that the concept of resistance (Widerstand) is fundamental in order to understand Schelling’s account of freedom. First, I argue that Schelling, in his early works, contends that the resistance opposed by nature to our individual will is fundamental for human beings to actualise freedom. Moreover, I show that Schelling maintains the centrality of resistance even in his philosophy of nature, and I demonstrate that resistance is that fundamental ontological occurrence which grounds the opposition between the basic forces of matter, and without which matter itself would not exist. Accordingly, resistance is also that material occurrence through which freedom can concretely take place in its being limited and constrained by necessity. Finally, I also show that Schelling reiterates such an understanding in his Freiheitsschrift, namely I argue that resistance is a fundamental occurrence even for the struggle between good and evil, which in turn implies that resistance inevitably influences our individual will and actions. On these grounds, I conclude by arguing that freedom can be understood as a matter of resistance, since it arises and is made possible only through resistance itself.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-29DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1957359
Rafael Pérez Baquero
ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer both an interpretation and a critique of the epistemological foundations underlying one of the most recent approaches to trauma studies: cultural trauma theory. After the First World War, the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, inquired into whether his diagnostic of “traumatic neurosis” could shed light on how collectives deal with unsettling experiences and memories. Throughout the intervening decades, Freud´s insights into collective trauma have attracted the interest of scholars from various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, from literary studies to historiography, memory studies, and, finally – the focus of this paper – cultural and social theory. By underlining the ways in which the proponents of cultural trauma theory – Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Smelzer, Piotr Sztompka, Bernhard Giesen, and Ron Eyerman – have reframed Freudian ideas regarding the transmission of legacies of collective suffering, the paper considers whether the notion of trauma can be extended to the analysis of cultures and societies. It explores the ambivalent relationship between psychoanalysis and contemporary cultural trauma theory to disclose the theoretical assumptions and weaknesses of the latter.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1953750
Eli B. Lichtenstein
ABSTRACT The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a “matrix” of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead, he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault’s contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today.
{"title":"Foucault’s Analytics of Sovereignty","authors":"Eli B. Lichtenstein","doi":"10.1080/14409917.2021.1953750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2021.1953750","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a “matrix” of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead, he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault’s contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today.","PeriodicalId":51905,"journal":{"name":"Critical Horizons","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14409917.2021.1953750","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42006612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1953747
Ejvind Hansen
ABSTRACT Silence is often considered under the sign of repression or oppression, and as such, the result of forces hostile to democracy. In this paper we will try to demystify that unilateral image of silence, reviving the dialectic between silence and democracy in which the former operates as a foundational precondition for exchanges in the democratic public spheres. An increased awareness of the structures of silence will help us reflect upon what remains external to ongoing public discourses. Through a reading of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger, it will be shown that understanding silence not as the passive negative of speaking, but as an active form of reflection, will help us become aware of what is pre-emptively excluded from discursive exchanges. It is argued that an awareness of this kind of silence can help us reflect upon the structures of public discourses.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1953749
C. E. Snyder
ABSTRACT In his 1981–82 lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault claims that a significant portion of the modern historiography of ancient philosophy tends to discredit the ethical framework of epimeleia heautou (“care of the self”). The thematic analysis of knowledge in the historiography of ancient philosophy overshadows the theme of care of the self. Taking Foucault’s claim as a point of departure, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, the paper provides a genealogy of the early Hellenistic Academy, from Polemo to Arcesilaus. Second, the paper demonstrates that for Arcesilaus, the alleged pioneer of what modern historiography has designated the Academy’s epistemological scepticism, philosophy is not restricted to a continual search for knowledge at a theoretically rarefied level of challenging arguments or discursive statements. This paper situates Arcesilaus’ opposition to early Stoic epistemology within the framework of Academic epimeleia heautou, and defends the thesis that under Arcesilaus the Hellenistic Academy undergoes a shift in the practice of care of the self.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1953751
Uroš Kranjc
ABSTRACT The article discusses the Hegelian opposition between institutions of Police and Corporation, leading to the objective spirit formed in the notion of the State. Juxtaposing both of Hegel's institutions against the usage of these notions proposed by Jacques Rancière (Police) and Alain Badiou (State of the Situation) opens a critical dividing line. We emphasize the inadequate handling of economic factors inherent in both notions, consequently obfuscating the economic conditioning of the political dimension in the social body. Moreover, we supplement both of the institutions with an economic-counterpart notion; to Police we add “Private Property” and to Corporation “State of Technology”. Further, we apply Badiou's handling of Hegel's dialectics as the dialectics of “constitutive scission”. The dialectical play of private property and state of technology is distinguished in the dialectics of algebra of places and topology of localizations. The resulting intersection is shown to be the place of torsion – corresponding to the place of the Subject – an interval, where we confront an uttered “wrong”, an interruption in the smooth counting of parts in a social body. This torsion is an immanent backside operation of the economic structure as far as it is a necessary factor in the upsurge of political subjectivity.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1953748
M. Papastephanou
ABSTRACT The present article extracts the normative and the crypto-normative from the polemical contexts in which they have been deployed as charges to study them in their more affirmative dimensions. Polemics increasingly contribute to a disabling dismissal of normativity that ultimately blocks nuanced re-conceptualizations of normative operations. Against this backdrop, the article attempts a first theorization of crypto-normativity as a concept in its own right independently from the Habermasian-Foucauldian polemics that initially framed it. However, instead of emerging as an escape route from normativity, crypto-normativity is defended as part and parcel of a broader set of normative “technologies” that assist human beings in their critical reshuffling of themselves and of their realities.
{"title":"On (Crypto-)Normativity","authors":"M. Papastephanou","doi":"10.1080/14409917.2021.1953748","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2021.1953748","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The present article extracts the normative and the crypto-normative from the polemical contexts in which they have been deployed as charges to study them in their more affirmative dimensions. Polemics increasingly contribute to a disabling dismissal of normativity that ultimately blocks nuanced re-conceptualizations of normative operations. Against this backdrop, the article attempts a first theorization of crypto-normativity as a concept in its own right independently from the Habermasian-Foucauldian polemics that initially framed it. However, instead of emerging as an escape route from normativity, crypto-normativity is defended as part and parcel of a broader set of normative “technologies” that assist human beings in their critical reshuffling of themselves and of their realities.","PeriodicalId":51905,"journal":{"name":"Critical Horizons","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14409917.2021.1953748","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44458060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2021.1953752
Philip Schauss
ABSTRACT English-language commentary on the role of the French Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit tends to equate the so-called “fury of destruction” (Furie des Verschwindens) with the violent dialectic of rival factions’ rush for power. Here it is argued that “Absolute Freedom and Terror” ought instead to be read in the light of a “fury of disappearance”, namely in terms of the extinction of dissenting citizens’ legal personhood. This is achieved by recourse to civil death, a criminal sentence that declares the individual, who is very much alive, legally dead. While there are some actual and quite painful consequences for recipients of such a sentence, civil death is effective mainly on the philosophical and constitutional planes, where it maintains the illusion of a unanimous general will, fleetingly securing the state from failure. A focus on personhood and civil death also taps into the larger Hegelian dialectic of legalism and tradition, and into the various shapes community life takes therein, beginning with Greek Ethical Life, and ending in Absolute Freedom and Terror.
摘要在黑格尔的精神现象学中,关于法国大革命的作用的英语评论倾向于将所谓的“毁灭之怒”(Furie des Verschwindens)等同于敌对派系争夺权力的暴力辩证法。在这里,有人认为,《绝对自由与恐怖》应该从“消失的愤怒”的角度来解读,即从持不同意见的公民法人的消亡的角度来理解。这是通过诉诸民事死亡来实现的,这是一种宣告个人在法律上死亡的刑事判决。虽然对这样的判决的接受者来说会有一些实际的、相当痛苦的后果,但民事死亡主要在哲学和宪法层面上是有效的,它保持着一致的普遍意愿的幻想,迅速地确保国家免于失败。对人格和公民死亡的关注也利用了黑格尔对法律主义和传统的辩证法,以及社区生活的各种形式,从希腊的伦理生活开始,到绝对自由和恐怖结束。
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2019.1676946
A. Pinzani
ABSTRACT The paper critically evaluates Rahel Jaeggi’s concept of form of life. Particularly, it deals with the question of why one should want to criticize forms of life or society in the first place. While Jaeggi mentions issues of rationality and success, the paper refers to issues of suffering. Therefore, it introduces firstly the concept of pervasive doctrine, which aims at complementing, not at substituting, Jaeggi’s concept of form of life. A pervasive doctrine is composed by (1) a coherent system of believes, by (2) a coherent set of values inspired by these believes, as well by a set of (3) norms and of (4) social practices organized around (1) and (2). It is pervasive insofar as it aims at explaining and regulating every aspect of the life of individuals and communities. The paper establishes, secondly, a connection between pervasive doctrines and systemic suffering, i.e. a suffering whose roots lie in the very way society is structured and the power relations within it that have been distributed along its history. Analysing the effects of pervasive doctrines in provoking systemic suffering is offered as a complementary critical strategy to the critique of forms of life provided by Jaeggi.
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